A London-based luxury activewear brand that counts the likes of Gigi Hadid and Sofia Richie among its customers has won its David and Goliath-esque trademark battle against sportswear giant Nike Inc.
East London-based LNDR took issue over the global brand’s use of “LDNR” in a recent advertising campaign and on Wednesday the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court sided with the small guy, so to speak.
It ruled that Nike cannot use the term “LDNR” again. It had been doing so in its “Nothing Beats a Londoner” campaign, which the judgement found to be an infringement of LNDR’s trademarks.
Nike’s campaign, launched in January, was used prominently on social media, while a TV advert for the campaign featured British Olympian Mo Farah, England soccer star Harry Kane and rapper Skepta.
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The court heard that Nike had conducted a trademark search six months before launching and knew about LNDR’s trademarks, but still went ahead with its campaign.
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Joanna Turner, cofounder of LNDR, said: “Nike’s campaign gained a huge amount of exposure very quickly. From our point of view, it was educating the public that ‘LDNR’ was either a Nike trademark, or that there was a collaboration between our two brands.”
She added that while it was no easy decision to go up against Nike, LNDR felt that it had no choice as confusion of its products or brand with Nike would be extremely damaging.
A spokesperson for Nike did not respond to request for comment. It’s not known if they plan to appeal the decision.
This came as Nike-owned Converse also lost a long legal battle with Sporttrading Holland this week after a court ruled that the former had wrongfully seized the latter’s shoes and that the company is entitled to compensation.
The debacle started when Converse and its Dutch importer Kesbo BV accused the Sporttrading Holland of trading in fake All Stars and seized the shoe company’s entire stock.